Vanishing, seemingly without a trace....
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"Application 121" covered an immense area. It stretched three hundred miles from north to south, and two hundred, fifty miles from east to west. Harsh would be an understatement in describing Application 121's landscape. In some places, there were towering dunes which rose six hundred feet above sea level. The northern section of Application 121 was a barren gravelly area, which did not have any identifiable landmarks. Well, there were a few rock formations, but that was about it. The southern section was more mountainous and rocky.
Because Application 121 covered so much area, the Libyan Petroleum Commission decided that Application 121 should be cut by twenty five percent. The question facing Ronald G. MacLean, D'Arcy Explorations Chief Geologist, was: which part of Application 121 should be bypassed?
There were no aerial photographs of the area, and the available maps dated back to World War Two. Obviously, aerial surveys were needed.
A World War Two military pilot himself, MacLean was painfully aware of the problems faced by aircrew flying over barren, featureless terrain, when utilizing "dead (i.e. "deduced") reckoning" navigation methods.
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